Frankly, I'd have have the system skewed towards some hypothetical 'deliberately keeping people sick' which we've never seen, then the actual health insurance industry, which has no incentive whatsoever to provide any care at all.
You might think about this for a minute or two. If the insurance companies have to insure high-risk people and they cannot do anything to mitigate this risk other than raise rates, I guess they might just have to raise the rates.
The lack of severability clause is a red herring. That's not how laws work. If part of it is unconstitutional, that part, and parts that require that part (Even if constitutional), are removed.
While the mandate is required to keep insurance companies from imploding...
...there's not actually any reason the rest of the law would not be 'possible'.
The fact it would destroy insurance companies does not make it unconstitutional. No one's forcing them to be in that market. It is not unconstitutional for the government to impose regulations that make it impossible to function in a market.
Severability clause are, in a sense, a 'manual override'. Without them, the entire law doesn't magically go away if part of it does....what happens is that the courts have to then decide what parts required that prohibited part.
The fact there's not a severability clause is a feature, not a bug. A severability clause would probably link the mandate to the new insurance companies regulations. Without it, the question becomes 'Do the new regulations require a mandate to function?', and the only honest answer to that is no. They require a mandate to keep the insurance industry afloat in the long term, but keeping the insurance industry afloat is not a requirement of the bill.
Of course, there's always the chance we won't get an honest answer to that.
I think I need a big disclaimer on all my posts that says:
I know how insurance works and I know this will bankrupt insurance companies.
I also know that insurance is entirely the wrong system for this, that idiots on the right forced us to use murderers^Whealth insurance companies for this, and and additionally I only care about 'bankrupting insurance companies' to the extent that means their heads aren't already on pikes paraded through the streets.
I have a feeling no one is grasping why I'm laughing at this ruling.
Um, I was born with a pre-existing condition, and, strangely enough, didn't have a choice to continue on my parent's insurance forever.
So at some point I had to try to get insurance myself, and, hey, what do you know? They wouldn't sell it to me.
And the same thing, of course, happens when people get laid off, as often happens when very ill. Cobra can last up to 3 years, which is, um, not forever. And then they have to attempt to purchase insurance on the market, and, hey, what do you know? No one will sell to them either.
In your universe, all the uninsurable are just freeloader who waited until they got sick. No one could have previously gotten sick while insured, but then been forced to drop that insurance and couldn't find any other.
And that's just what can legally happen. We'll pretend that insurance companies don't deliberately find ways to drop people on their rolls who got sick. Nope, just limiting ourselves to entirely legal situations, there are plenty of situations where someone cannot continue their insurance...and then can't buy more.
Incidentally, there is no such thing as a 'transfer of insurance'. You can't go to an insurance company and say 'These other guys insure me, so you should take over'. It really doesn't make any sense for them to allow you to do that if they're deny you otherwise, and thus absolutely no company does that, and it's really just something you invented.
The only 'transfer of insurance' I can think of would be Cobra, which is kinda that, but time limited.
I'm not arguing we shouldn't have healthcare coverage at all. That's way beyond the scope of this comment. What I'm arguing is that you, specifically, are not talking about insurance. What you're talking about requires re-working the way healthcare is paid for from the ground up. When everyone has a policy, and the price is mandated by law, and people with pre-existing conditions are covered, you don't have an insurance system any more.
You seem to be under the impression I want insurance. I know how insurance works, and I know how incredibly stupid a system it is for something that is not optional, like health care. And I know how 'unfair' the law will be for health insurance companies.(1)
I was just taking issue with the statement of 'mark72005' where he said 'No more people are covered'.
I was not covered, I will be covered, I am a person, he is wrong. Q.E.D.
If you want to know my actual stance on the fucking stupid idea of health insurance or the way we've decided to it make even stupider, please find some other posts of mine.
1) Although I suspect I'm going in the other direction than you WRT to 'unfair'...I think it's unfair we haven't disassembled insurance company CEO for medical parts. A business that makes more money the more service they deny. That would just be stupid if it was lightbulbs or car washes..it's fucking obscene for health care.
So, do you not work for a company? I've never heard of a company provided health plan reject an employee, even with pre-existing conditions.
I work for (and partially own) a company with less than 10 people. At that scale, they actually look at the people before selling the business insurance.
I am, in effect, denying everyone at my company insurance.
If you are self employed...well, I ran into that for awhile too. After my last W2 gig, I let the cobra run out, and found out that it is very difficult to get insurance if you have let insuranse laps. I had high triglycerides which is a huge flag for insurance companies.
While I feel for you, don't confuse your situation with actually being uninsurable. You had warning flags, but managed to get in.
I have had open heart surgery. I have a pacemaker. I am actually, not kidding, uninsurable in the literal meaning of the word, not 'only fly by night' insurable.
If you really have trouble getting insurance, look to your state. I almost did it in mine for the un-insurable. Yes, it is a bit pricey, but will cover you till you can get regular insurance providers to take you on.
My state is conservative, which means we have no such system. But I can do the Federal thing in 2011.
Yeah, but state governments have more leeway. The Federal government is supposed to only regulate interstate commerce, and health insurance is explicitly not interstate.
There actually is a valid constitutional point there. The Federal government blatantly went and regulated intrastate commerce.
My fondest wish is that that part of the law gets struck down, and insurance companies start hemorrhaging money as only the sick buy the insurance they are required to sell them. Wait, no. My fondest wish is they start hemorrhaging blood, but money will do.
I personally would prefer the more socialist solution, but republicans would not go for that.
I would also. But don't fall for 'socialist'.
Socialism is when the government owns the 'means of production'. The 'means of production' are how you make 'products', aka, how you make goods. Under socialism, the government makes goods and sell them. (Communism is when the government give them away.)
Services are another thing altogether. Services are not goods. The means of production provides goods, not services.
The entire function of a government is to provide services to the citizens. Protection from invasion, roads (Which are services...they aren't handing out roads, they are providing the service of a place to operate a car.), post office, justice system, etc. or, even, Health Care.
Government includes services, period. It's when it starts including goods that it becomes socialism. Don't fall for the Republican's framing of 'health care' as socialism. Health care is a service. It cannot be 'produced', and hence the government cannot 'own the means of production'.
Laws that authorize the spending of money *must* originate in the House (per the Constitution). All other types of laws can originate in either the House or the Senate.
Technically, yes, but all that means is that the bill number must originate in the House.
As long as the Senate has some House bills laying around they haven't passed (And this is true 99% of the time, except for the very first day or so of the Senate.), all they have to do is strip out all the contents and put their own bill in there, via an amendment, and then pass that, which then gets sent 'back' over to the House with entirely new text.
This is an abuse of process, and violates the spirit of the constitution, but probably constitutional.
Strictly speaking, there doesn't seem to be any remedy at all, even if the Senate just outright made such a bill. If the Senate and House agree and the president signs it, it's still law, as the constitution clearly says.
As you pointed out, the Supreme Court seized the power to declare a law in violation of the constitution, and hence the law void, but has never, at any time, declared a specific process of passing a law in violation of the constitution. That's not really the same power, and the Supreme Court has traditionally stayed as far away from internals of the Legislative Branch as it can.
Nor is it known what that would mean if the court did look at it. If the constitution says Congress can't pass a specific law, and they do, logically, that law does not exist, the court is on sane footing there, even if it's sane footing they seized themselves. But revenue bill just 'shall' originate in the House, so...what happens if they don't? Moreover, what happens to the law that the bill turned into...just because the 'bill' wasn't allowed doesn't mean the 'law' isn't. Did they just vote a bill that doesn't exist into law? Huh?
This is one of those hypothetical 'constitutional crisis' things, where our government can physically do things that no one can figure out what should happen legally.
Note that nowhere in the Constitution is this authority explicitly granted to the judiciary. It's not explicitly granted to *anyone*. But early in the country's history, the Supreme Court arbitrarily decided that it was the the job of the judiciary to judge the constitutionality of laws, and since it's been 200 or so years without anyone amending the Constitution to say otherwise it's pretty much generally accepted that the courts *do* have this power.
That, I think, is the really hilarious part of 'originalism' in constitutional thought. Sure, let's go by that. Under that, this law might, indeed be unconstitutional. So, sucks to be them, then....there's no actual 'constitutional' way, under their definition of 'constitutional', to deal with unconstitutional laws.;)
The US, despite having a written constitution, exists in a framework of tradition, just like every country.
The whole reason it was passed in its current form was as a compromise to keep it a private system -- a compromise demanded by the very same people who now are trying to finagle this as a constitutional issue. Congress could have just increased taxes and had the government buy policies for everyone, or even supplied the health care directly rather than go trough a third party bean counting organization.
This.
As I said elsewhere, there are only three ways to make everyone have health insurance(1):
a) Remove all insurance companies, have only a government run plan, aka, single payer. Republicans killed it.
b) Have a public option that covers people who insurance companies won't insure (Like, oh, me.) Republicans killed it.
c) Require insurance companies to insure everyone, even people with pre-existing conditions. Which, as would rightly pointed out, destroy insurance companies as people would wait until they were sick to get insurance...so we required everyone to have insurance.
There were no other solution to 'insure people insurance companies will not insure'. None. No one has any other solutions, and Republicans killed two of the three. They don't get to bitch about the third.
Well, okay, they're allowed to bitch if their bitching removes the one thing keeping insurance companies from being destroyed...then I'll be right alongside them, pretending to be a tea party member, complaining about how we have to buy insurance and that part of the law needs repealing. And I'll stand there and watch their judges strike down that part of the law, and cheer that on also.
And then I will watch insurance companies burn.
Mwuhahahaha.
1) Which we've decided to do for some reason, when the actual problem is people need health care. But our national debate has gotten so fucked up we can't even talk about that.
It's not often I find myself agreeing with a libertarian WRT to health care, but everything you said there is true.
Now, I think that the government should be covering large medical costs, and you probably don't...
...but anyone, on any part of the political spectrum, should realize that having, as a middle man between us and health care, an industry that makes more money the less service they resell is not particularly a reasonable way to operate any market at all, and has managed to totally fuck up both supply and demand.
The health care industry is broken in an amazingly obvious way, for an incredibly obvious reason. No other industry on the planet operates mainly by having people give a flat fee to a reseller, who then purchases and gives the customer as little of the product as they decide he needs.
It's mind-boggling how stupid the basic premise is. To paraphrase Douglas Adams: 'The serious flaws of the system is obscured by the trivial flaws of the system'. We have tax incentives to make this happen!
Now, you think health care would be entirely affordable if we didn't do that, and I agree 80%, but think we need some sort of safety net for people, but I'm glad we both see the actual problem here.
And it's totally absurd that the 'solution' was to funnel even more money to them.
No more people are covered, some people have less coverage, and for all it is more expensive.
Jesus Christ, some people here are uninformed.
I will state this bluntly: I was not covered before. I have a pre-existing condition and cannot get insurance on the private market. Not 'cannot afford'...cannot get. I've called up the dozen or so insurance companies that operate in my state, explained my medical condition, they inform me I cannot get insurance from them.
When the goddamn deadline rolls around in 2013, health insurance companies will have to sell insurance to me. (And I think there's a 'Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan' I can get on starting 2011.)
Assuming I am a 'people', and I was last I checked, at least ONE more person is covered. Period, the end.
Why didn't you negotiate a longer contract term when it was "20-30% less?"
I think the bus from the group home is leaving, better not miss it. That's nice, run along.
(Kinda weird how he thought we could just dictate how long contract terms would be, isn't it? Like the other guy, who knows the cost is going to go up later, is going to let you make whatever length contract you want at the current price.)
As someone on the left, i entirely agree. This is one absurd scam from the start.
What we should have done is, you know, had a public option that people could opt out of if they were insured some other way.
But I love how the right is blaming the left for this. This idiocy is because insurance companies won't insure everyone, and drop people when they get sick.
We had three options to get full coverage: a) remove all insurance, require everyone to pay taxes for a single payer system or just government provided health care, b) add a government-run insurance option of the last resort, aka, the public option, that people rejected by insurance companies could use, or c) require insurance companies to insure everyone, regardless of health.
We picked c, and, as it was rightly pointed out, if you do c, insurance companies will only have sick people on the rolls...everyone will just wait until they are sick. So we required them all to buy insurance.
If you didn't want this outcome, all you people on the right suddenly worried about the constitution, you should have picked one of the first two options. You forced us into the fucking stupid one.
And now we've hilariously headed towards c without part that makes it works. Insurance companies will go bankrupt. Which is way, way, way too nice for them.
Yeah, that's going to be an interesting political battle, right there.
Sure, the tea party people claim they want it repealed, but it's going to be interesting to actually ask them 'So you want insurance companies to deny insurance to children with pre-existing conditions again?'.
While I don't have a very good option of the tea party, when you actually ask them about the provisions of the health care law that they don't like, they (At least those who can actually point to parts) seem to only be able to pointed to 'forced to buy insurance'. That's it. That's all they actually object to.
None of them, no matter how anti-government, object to the rules requiring insurance companies to provide coverage to people. Maybe 1 out of 100. No matter how...um...uninformed (Trying to be nice here) the right's base is on this issue, 'Don't require insurance companies to insure unhealthy people!' is a damn hard rallying cry to get people behind.
Indeed, I half suspected something like this would happen, and as someone as liberal as humanly possible, I am laughing my ass off.
To recap: We should have had single payer system.
Instead, insurance companies, looking to make even more money, promised to insure everyone...but only if everyone was forced to buy from them, so that the healthy couldn't skip out on the deal.
If the latter part of that gets sentence struck down, insurance companies will have to insure anyone who wants it (I.e, who is currently sick) and then, when healthy, the person can just let their insurance lapse, secure in the fact they can just buy more insurance when they need, because insurance companies can no longer deny insurance on any grounds except failure to pay.
I am fucking rolling on the floor laughing. I mean that literally. I read this an hour ago, and it's taken me that long to stop laughing to comment. I had to make a support call during that, and I had serious difficulty not cracking up during it.
You just utterly fucked yourself, insurance companies. Oh, man, oh man.
I hope the teaparty folks take this as a rallying cry, and regardless of how this goes in the court, yell at their congressmen to remove exactly this part of the law.
You are so in love with your own smugly irrational ideology that basic arithmetic escapes you. a) no we would not, there is no need to "materialize" anything beyond the normal mining and exploration - the point of using a natural resource as a reference is scarcity - less mining the better, b) no, we would simply add a new sub-unit to $1 dollar, called cents. Should that prove insufficient, we would divide the cents into smaller sub-units, etc. The amount of gold that corresponds to each new unit would simply decrease as compared to the unchanged old units, the finite limit being an amount being small enough to be measured practically, at which point we would switch from gold to much more difficult to obtain (i.e. scarce) material and repeat the process, c) no such thing would have been needed.
Sigh. If you're expecting these new smaller units to be able to buy as much as the old units, (and thus the older ones could buy more) you've just REINVENTED FIAT CURRENCY, you idiot.
Do you really not grasp that gold-based currencies can't vary in value? The entire fucking point is that they are fixed to the price of gold. The only way for them to vary in value is for there to be more or less gold. (What's more, it might not even be possible for the government to control this by adding and removing gold coinage...the value might just be stuck, by the world market, to the gold market in general.)
You're assuming that somehow the dollar can be fixed to gold, but vary in value WRT everything else. Which is a) stupid, prices cannot operate like that, and b) if it did work, would defeat 90% of the supposed point of gold-based currency to start with, because now you do have inflation.
To repeat: WHAT YOU JUST DESCRIBED IS CALLED INFLATION, the exact thing you're railing against.
But, hey, I posed a puzzle for you in my other post. Go and solve it. Explain the actual changes you'd do, not how you're vaguely 'divide the currency more'.
In a fiat currency world, because of inflation, debt is seen not only as the trivial, commonplace norm, it is the fundamental factor in self-propelling the inflationary hamster wheel.
And now we get to the real nonsense, where inflation is blamed for all the woes, so if we have a system when it's not allowed, everything will magically be fine.
Of course, gold idiots never realize that we have inflation, deliberately, because inflation is a good thing. The alternative is to have random deflation and inflation as the economy changed in size. (Or have the economy trapped in a form-fitted box, as the gold idiots want.)
Keeping inflation slightly ahead of the economy causes the economy to constantly chase it, which is why we have policies to deliberately keep it like that. If you want to argue we've kept it too far ahead of an economy that hasn't grown much, you are correct in that, but it doesn't change the fact it's done on purpose and is a good idea when done correctly.
And none of the quite real problems you have with the borrowing economy has anything at all to do with inflation. In fact, strangely enough, half those problems were because we were trying to keep inflation low, so kept interest rates low, when it probably would have been better to do something else to keep inflation down. (And it would have been best of all to actually have economic growth instead of constant economic drain to other countries.)
Spoofing addresses should not be allowed. Networks should not let packets with source addresses outside their network on the internet in the first place.
You know, I'm not sure that was clear, and it's not your fault you're ignorant, so I will make a little example of what I'm talking about, and invite you to solve the problem I mentioned.I will simplify the numbers, and you will see the problem:
There is a gold standard. There are 20,000 ounces of gold that the US has, and it has turned 10,000 into dollars at $1 an ounce.
There are 1000 people in the US. All of them work. They make $10 a day, paid every day. There are 100 businesses. They each employ 10 people.
A week is 10 days, and, each week, on a random day, people take the $100 they've earned during that week, and go out and buy $100 worth of goods from the other businesses. This $100, over the next week, will be paid out to workers.
At any given time, there is an average of $50 in each person's bank account, and $500 in each business bank account. That's 50*1000+500*100. That's $10,000. This economy needs exactly as much money as it has.
But wait, the population increases! Now there are 1500 people, and 150 businesses. So the government has to issue more gold, and it keeps doing that until it hits $20,000 and physically runs out of gold.
So what happens when the population hits 2500? Well, it gets complicated, because it's a loop without an obvious start. Neither business nor people have enough cash, which would normally result in deflation, but can't here. (The money is always worth at least what the government will pay for it.)
Note that deflation is bad, but what happens is worse: People, to keep buying food, eventually start exchanging work directly in exchange for food, aka, going back to a barter economy. Businesses start issuing 'coupons' instead of paychecks, and eventually start issuing scrip, which is them functionally inventing their own fiat currency.
So, here's the question to you: What do you do to stop this from happening? Please note the population isn't the only way the economy grows, it's just the easiest to explain. (For example, notice what happens in the original if people only spend $9 a week and save $1.)
And this isn't some hypothetical. If we'd stayed on the gold standard of $35 an ounce, we'd have long run out of actual gold.
As far as the priests of the fiat currency religion go, I've heard a lot of exquisite bullshit and logical pretzels but this is my all time favourite: you see, currencies tied to physical natural resources are indivisible! You can't make more by simply dividing the unit of 1 (let's call the thing a "dollar") into 100 of (let's call the thing "cents"). Impossible I tell you!
If you divide the thing more among existing issued currency, aka, if one 'gold dollar' is now worth half the amount of gold, you have, tada, inflation, and you've just 'printed more money'. If, OTOH, you try to print more gold, um, I already said we're out of gold Not enough has actually been mined.
I don't even begin to understand how you think a gold-based system works, but the actual fact is, if we'd stayed on a gold standard, either a) We would have had to materialize twice as much gold as exists out of thin air, or b) we'd have had to change the price of a dollar from $35 an ounce to $70 an ounce, and then to $100 an ounce, and right now we'd need about $300 an ounce, c) we'd have started at that $300 an ounce price, which makes it a fiat currency where the government will only pay 10% of the actual value in gold, and we'll still hit B later, or d) we'd have an economy that's a tenth of the size of the current one, and about half the size of one capable of actually feeding everyone.
THERE ARE NO OTHER OPTIONS.
Please note that a requires magic, and is exactly the same as printing more money, b is manual inflation, and exactly the same as printing more money, c has uncontrollable inflation, and d has people dying in the streets because their employer does not have any money to physically hand them for them to exchange for food. (Or, more likely at this point, living on some not-backed-by-anything borrowing system, like the English did. Let's convert to an IOU based economy, where businesses and the wealthy issue scrip instead of paying people, and at some point we just all hope we need something from them so we can exchange it back.)
In a real, working economy the amount of labour is balanced by the amount of real services and products.
And in a real, working economy, both those must have enough actual cash to operate, which your hypothetical gold-based one soon would not allow.
As in not in "financial services" and "disposable entertainment" which in a sane world would represent a tiny minority of the economy. Economy that is based on producing bullshit for the sake of bullshit fake "money", all of it topped by a gigantic casino, is a bomb that must explode, eventually. As the victims of the con in the US (and the whole Western world actually) are discovering the hard way.
It is fucking amazing how gold loons tend to blame every economic issue on the money. Gold did not cause disposable entertainment, you idiot.
While you are indeed thinking of Switzerland, I find it disturbing also.
If someone is accused of rape and turns themselves in, in what universe are they denied access to their bank accounts?
Think what you want about the rape charge, but, hell, even if he'd confessed to rape, been tried and convicted, even in the worse hypothetical you can think of...he'd still be able to pay for a fucking lawyer out of his bank account. You can be on death row for a decade and still can write checks to your lawyer. (Freezing a bank account should not be confused with being ordered to pay restitution, which is a criminal punishment and, as such, happens after a trial. As Assange has not been tried yet, that is not relevant here.)
The only legal reason to freeze bank accounts is if the bank account is involved in a crime, or if he's fleeing justice...and, last I checked, rape doesn't have anything to do with finances at all. And he's not 'fleeing justice' when he's in custody(1).
This is probably the same logic that lead the UK government to deny bond, on the grounds he might be a 'flight risk'. A flight risk that, inexplicably, turned themselves in. Sorry, if you turn yourself in, bail should be pretty automatic and nominal...presumably, if you were going to flee, you would have just fled to start with.
Absolutely nothing is normal about how Assange is being treated, at all. He's charged with one crime, and then somehow that charge is letting government punish him for Wikileaks stuff that has nothing to do with that crime.
1) He only ever was 'fleeing justice' in crazy land where you're required to turn yourself in for criminal charges that don't exist...the second valid legal charges got filed against him, he contacted the police and turned himself in. Regardless of how people want to manipulate and lie about that, however, he's clearly in custody now, so his bank accounts should be unfrozen now.
I think anyone who repeats that lie that Wikileaks has released 250,000 cables should have 'MEDIA WHORE' branded onto their forehead, to demonstrate they are willing to repeat obviously factually wrong information as long as the media tells them.
Serious question. Yes, the BitCoins are and will further gain in value, which is normally called deflation.
And is a very bad thing. Worse than inflation.
There are a lot of economists who'd say that's a very bad thing, but those are the same ones who ram wall-street into the ground regularly, so I'd not give them too much credit.
No, Wall Street's capture of regulatory institutions and their inability to regulate cause the Great Fuckup, and Congress's inability to actually stop companies from going overseas caused the recession.
It has nothing at do with fiat currency, you idiot.
* Central banks could not print as much (FIAT) money as they'd like (now a days they use the euphemism: quantitative easing). They could not print any. This would mean, that they could not inflate away debt (which is what's actually going on). They'd actually had to do responsible accounting (imagine that).
And it would permanently restrict the size of the economy.
That's the real joke all you anti 'fiat currency' loons don't get. If we'd, for example, stayed on the gold standard...there's not actually enough gold in existence to operate the economy at $35 an ounce.
We'd have fucking money shortages, which have actually happened before. It happened in England once, where people cannot actually locate enough money to actually do things. If there's only physically $400 floating around, no one can actually buy a damn car, and people have to start bartering for stuff.
When it happened last in England, luckily, checks had been invented, so trusted people would write checks (despite not having cash.) and people would pass them around like currency, until they got back to the trusted person.
In other words, 'fiat money' is so evil that people spontaneously invent it when forced to use your stupid system.
* This would encourage people to actually save and spend what they have, and not buy everything on debt creating massive problems down the road.
Ah, yes, and people saving money in the bank would help the economy. In stupid land, where recessions are caused by something other than people not purchasing things.
No one will spend money to buy stuff, and hence no one will need jobs, but that's okay because everyone can sit at home on their deflationary money and live off the fact their money is now, somehow, 'worth more'.
That is perhaps the dumbest economic theory I've ever...scratch that. That's the dumbest theory, period, that I've ever heard.
Please google 'The Great Depression' for more information. Please note the deflation rate during that. Wow, everyone could have sat at home and earned 10% interest every year! I wonder how there was a depression?
This all would make pretty good economic stability and nominal growth (not this exponential lunatic thing we see today, ending in bubbles most of the time).
Well, yes. If you destroy the economy, you can no longer have bubbles. Good catch.
Bubbles have nothing do with the currency at all. Nor do they even have anything to do borrowing.
Incidentally, you can't have 'nominal growth' under a fixed amount of currency. You can't have any growth. (Which poses a rather large problem when you do have population growth.)
This is all based on simple logic, and must not be true, but can it get much worse than it's right now? I doubt it.
Perhaps 'simple' you and your 'simple' logic should be getting back to the group home? I think there's ice cream this evening!
Actually, thinking about this, the 'safest' way to do this is to require them to have a fake ticket. The TSA-IG should issue one when you sign in.
Then you can't get on any plane.
For even added security, you could put the TSA-IG person right behind security, and he sees the names of everyone who goes through, and any tester's name gets highlighted, and immediately after they go through, he grabs them.
He's grabbing them to give them money, of course, but it stops all security concerns like 'Someone might sign up and pass the stuff off to another person once in'.
Of course, that's a rather idiotic plan. A better plan is to just 'forgot' stuff in your bag...they're not going to arrest you for having a pocketknife in your bag, and plenty of people have plenty of stories about that getting missed.
If you're a terrorist and smart enough to shuffle stuff around inside the security area, it's trivial to just keep someone in the security area (Via a flight in.) and have them keep collecting stuff as you hit-and-miss the things singley past security. Hell, they can occasionally get on airplanes and move to another airport's secure area, although someone else would have to buy and print their ticket (and a ticket for themselves) and take it in...you can't print a ticket in the secure area that I can think of. OTOH, nothing stops you from taking a printer in with you...
Frankly, if I was an anti-TSA activist, and didn't care about flying, and had the money, I'd get a bunch of people to blatantly do this in front of the TSA with liquids. One person carry in a dozen empty gallon jugs in their luggage, and then have people just keep streaming in and filling up the jugs from 2oz shampoo bottles, right in full view of them. If you actually used shampoo, it's hard to see what, exactly, they'd do about it, even though you've flagrantly managed to get more than 2 oz from the outside into the secure area....and everyone else gets the point that it didn't have to be shampoo, it could be whatever nonsensical thing is dangerous over 2oz.
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Frankly, I'd have have the system skewed towards some hypothetical 'deliberately keeping people sick' which we've never seen, then the actual health insurance industry, which has no incentive whatsoever to provide any care at all.
You might think about this for a minute or two. If the insurance companies have to insure high-risk people and they cannot do anything to mitigate this risk other than raise rates, I guess they might just have to raise the rates.
Yup.
The lack of severability clause is a red herring. That's not how laws work. If part of it is unconstitutional, that part, and parts that require that part (Even if constitutional), are removed.
While the mandate is required to keep insurance companies from imploding...
The fact it would destroy insurance companies does not make it unconstitutional. No one's forcing them to be in that market. It is not unconstitutional for the government to impose regulations that make it impossible to function in a market.
Severability clause are, in a sense, a 'manual override'. Without them, the entire law doesn't magically go away if part of it does....what happens is that the courts have to then decide what parts required that prohibited part.
The fact there's not a severability clause is a feature, not a bug. A severability clause would probably link the mandate to the new insurance companies regulations. Without it, the question becomes 'Do the new regulations require a mandate to function?', and the only honest answer to that is no. They require a mandate to keep the insurance industry afloat in the long term, but keeping the insurance industry afloat is not a requirement of the bill.
Of course, there's always the chance we won't get an honest answer to that.
I'll tell you what, when you get the US deficit down to manageable levels let's talk single payer.
Yes, let's wait until we lower the deficit to do things that would lower the deficit. *rolls eyes*
I think I need a big disclaimer on all my posts that says:
I know how insurance works and I know this will bankrupt insurance companies.
I also know that insurance is entirely the wrong system for this, that idiots on the right forced us to use murderers^Whealth insurance companies for this, and and additionally I only care about 'bankrupting insurance companies' to the extent that means their heads aren't already on pikes paraded through the streets.
I have a feeling no one is grasping why I'm laughing at this ruling.
Um, I was born with a pre-existing condition, and, strangely enough, didn't have a choice to continue on my parent's insurance forever.
So at some point I had to try to get insurance myself, and, hey, what do you know? They wouldn't sell it to me.
And the same thing, of course, happens when people get laid off, as often happens when very ill. Cobra can last up to 3 years, which is, um, not forever. And then they have to attempt to purchase insurance on the market, and, hey, what do you know? No one will sell to them either.
In your universe, all the uninsurable are just freeloader who waited until they got sick. No one could have previously gotten sick while insured, but then been forced to drop that insurance and couldn't find any other.
And that's just what can legally happen. We'll pretend that insurance companies don't deliberately find ways to drop people on their rolls who got sick. Nope, just limiting ourselves to entirely legal situations, there are plenty of situations where someone cannot continue their insurance...and then can't buy more.
Incidentally, there is no such thing as a 'transfer of insurance'. You can't go to an insurance company and say 'These other guys insure me, so you should take over'. It really doesn't make any sense for them to allow you to do that if they're deny you otherwise, and thus absolutely no company does that, and it's really just something you invented.
The only 'transfer of insurance' I can think of would be Cobra, which is kinda that, but time limited.
I'm not arguing we shouldn't have healthcare coverage at all. That's way beyond the scope of this comment. What I'm arguing is that you, specifically, are not talking about insurance. What you're talking about requires re-working the way healthcare is paid for from the ground up. When everyone has a policy, and the price is mandated by law, and people with pre-existing conditions are covered, you don't have an insurance system any more.
You seem to be under the impression I want insurance. I know how insurance works, and I know how incredibly stupid a system it is for something that is not optional, like health care. And I know how 'unfair' the law will be for health insurance companies.(1)
I was just taking issue with the statement of 'mark72005' where he said 'No more people are covered'.
I was not covered, I will be covered, I am a person, he is wrong. Q.E.D.
If you want to know my actual stance on the fucking stupid idea of health insurance or the way we've decided to it make even stupider, please find some other posts of mine.
1) Although I suspect I'm going in the other direction than you WRT to 'unfair'...I think it's unfair we haven't disassembled insurance company CEO for medical parts. A business that makes more money the more service they deny. That would just be stupid if it was lightbulbs or car washes..it's fucking obscene for health care.
So, do you not work for a company? I've never heard of a company provided health plan reject an employee, even with pre-existing conditions.
I work for (and partially own) a company with less than 10 people. At that scale, they actually look at the people before selling the business insurance.
I am, in effect, denying everyone at my company insurance.
If you are self employed...well, I ran into that for awhile too. After my last W2 gig, I let the cobra run out, and found out that it is very difficult to get insurance if you have let insuranse laps. I had high triglycerides which is a huge flag for insurance companies.
While I feel for you, don't confuse your situation with actually being uninsurable. You had warning flags, but managed to get in.
I have had open heart surgery. I have a pacemaker. I am actually, not kidding, uninsurable in the literal meaning of the word, not 'only fly by night' insurable.
If you really have trouble getting insurance, look to your state. I almost did it in mine for the un-insurable. Yes, it is a bit pricey, but will cover you till you can get regular insurance providers to take you on.
My state is conservative, which means we have no such system. But I can do the Federal thing in 2011.
Yeah, but state governments have more leeway. The Federal government is supposed to only regulate interstate commerce, and health insurance is explicitly not interstate.
There actually is a valid constitutional point there. The Federal government blatantly went and regulated intrastate commerce.
My fondest wish is that that part of the law gets struck down, and insurance companies start hemorrhaging money as only the sick buy the insurance they are required to sell them. Wait, no. My fondest wish is they start hemorrhaging blood, but money will do.
I personally would prefer the more socialist solution, but republicans would not go for that.
I would also. But don't fall for 'socialist'.
Socialism is when the government owns the 'means of production'. The 'means of production' are how you make 'products', aka, how you make goods. Under socialism, the government makes goods and sell them. (Communism is when the government give them away.)
Services are another thing altogether. Services are not goods. The means of production provides goods, not services.
The entire function of a government is to provide services to the citizens. Protection from invasion, roads (Which are services...they aren't handing out roads, they are providing the service of a place to operate a car.), post office, justice system, etc. or, even, Health Care.
Government includes services, period. It's when it starts including goods that it becomes socialism. Don't fall for the Republican's framing of 'health care' as socialism. Health care is a service. It cannot be 'produced', and hence the government cannot 'own the means of production'.
Laws that authorize the spending of money *must* originate in the House (per the Constitution). All other types of laws can originate in either the House or the Senate.
Technically, yes, but all that means is that the bill number must originate in the House.
As long as the Senate has some House bills laying around they haven't passed (And this is true 99% of the time, except for the very first day or so of the Senate.), all they have to do is strip out all the contents and put their own bill in there, via an amendment, and then pass that, which then gets sent 'back' over to the House with entirely new text.
This is an abuse of process, and violates the spirit of the constitution, but probably constitutional.
Strictly speaking, there doesn't seem to be any remedy at all, even if the Senate just outright made such a bill. If the Senate and House agree and the president signs it, it's still law, as the constitution clearly says.
As you pointed out, the Supreme Court seized the power to declare a law in violation of the constitution, and hence the law void, but has never, at any time, declared a specific process of passing a law in violation of the constitution. That's not really the same power, and the Supreme Court has traditionally stayed as far away from internals of the Legislative Branch as it can.
Nor is it known what that would mean if the court did look at it. If the constitution says Congress can't pass a specific law, and they do, logically, that law does not exist, the court is on sane footing there, even if it's sane footing they seized themselves. But revenue bill just 'shall' originate in the House, so...what happens if they don't? Moreover, what happens to the law that the bill turned into...just because the 'bill' wasn't allowed doesn't mean the 'law' isn't. Did they just vote a bill that doesn't exist into law? Huh?
This is one of those hypothetical 'constitutional crisis' things, where our government can physically do things that no one can figure out what should happen legally.
Note that nowhere in the Constitution is this authority explicitly granted to the judiciary. It's not explicitly granted to *anyone*. But early in the country's history, the Supreme Court arbitrarily decided that it was the the job of the judiciary to judge the constitutionality of laws, and since it's been 200 or so years without anyone amending the Constitution to say otherwise it's pretty much generally accepted that the courts *do* have this power.
That, I think, is the really hilarious part of 'originalism' in constitutional thought. Sure, let's go by that. Under that, this law might, indeed be unconstitutional. So, sucks to be them, then....there's no actual 'constitutional' way, under their definition of 'constitutional', to deal with unconstitutional laws. ;)
The US, despite having a written constitution, exists in a framework of tradition, just like every country.
The whole reason it was passed in its current form was as a compromise to keep it a private system -- a compromise demanded by the very same people who now are trying to finagle this as a constitutional issue. Congress could have just increased taxes and had the government buy policies for everyone, or even supplied the health care directly rather than go trough a third party bean counting organization.
This.
As I said elsewhere, there are only three ways to make everyone have health insurance(1):
a) Remove all insurance companies, have only a government run plan, aka, single payer. Republicans killed it.
b) Have a public option that covers people who insurance companies won't insure (Like, oh, me.) Republicans killed it.
c) Require insurance companies to insure everyone, even people with pre-existing conditions. Which, as would rightly pointed out, destroy insurance companies as people would wait until they were sick to get insurance...so we required everyone to have insurance.
There were no other solution to 'insure people insurance companies will not insure'. None. No one has any other solutions, and Republicans killed two of the three. They don't get to bitch about the third.
Well, okay, they're allowed to bitch if their bitching removes the one thing keeping insurance companies from being destroyed...then I'll be right alongside them, pretending to be a tea party member, complaining about how we have to buy insurance and that part of the law needs repealing. And I'll stand there and watch their judges strike down that part of the law, and cheer that on also.
And then I will watch insurance companies burn.
Mwuhahahaha.
1) Which we've decided to do for some reason, when the actual problem is people need health care. But our national debate has gotten so fucked up we can't even talk about that.
It's not often I find myself agreeing with a libertarian WRT to health care, but everything you said there is true.
Now, I think that the government should be covering large medical costs, and you probably don't...
The health care industry is broken in an amazingly obvious way, for an incredibly obvious reason. No other industry on the planet operates mainly by having people give a flat fee to a reseller, who then purchases and gives the customer as little of the product as they decide he needs.
It's mind-boggling how stupid the basic premise is. To paraphrase Douglas Adams: 'The serious flaws of the system is obscured by the trivial flaws of the system'. We have tax incentives to make this happen!
Now, you think health care would be entirely affordable if we didn't do that, and I agree 80%, but think we need some sort of safety net for people, but I'm glad we both see the actual problem here.
And it's totally absurd that the 'solution' was to funnel even more money to them.
No more people are covered, some people have less coverage, and for all it is more expensive.
Jesus Christ, some people here are uninformed.
I will state this bluntly: I was not covered before. I have a pre-existing condition and cannot get insurance on the private market. Not 'cannot afford'...cannot get. I've called up the dozen or so insurance companies that operate in my state, explained my medical condition, they inform me I cannot get insurance from them.
When the goddamn deadline rolls around in 2013, health insurance companies will have to sell insurance to me. (And I think there's a 'Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan' I can get on starting 2011.)
Assuming I am a 'people', and I was last I checked, at least ONE more person is covered. Period, the end.
Please fucking google 'uninsurable'
Why didn't you negotiate a longer contract term when it was "20-30% less?"
I think the bus from the group home is leaving, better not miss it. That's nice, run along.
(Kinda weird how he thought we could just dictate how long contract terms would be, isn't it? Like the other guy, who knows the cost is going to go up later, is going to let you make whatever length contract you want at the current price.)
As someone on the left, i entirely agree. This is one absurd scam from the start.
What we should have done is, you know, had a public option that people could opt out of if they were insured some other way.
But I love how the right is blaming the left for this. This idiocy is because insurance companies won't insure everyone, and drop people when they get sick.
We had three options to get full coverage: a) remove all insurance, require everyone to pay taxes for a single payer system or just government provided health care, b) add a government-run insurance option of the last resort, aka, the public option, that people rejected by insurance companies could use, or c) require insurance companies to insure everyone, regardless of health.
We picked c, and, as it was rightly pointed out, if you do c, insurance companies will only have sick people on the rolls...everyone will just wait until they are sick. So we required them all to buy insurance.
If you didn't want this outcome, all you people on the right suddenly worried about the constitution, you should have picked one of the first two options. You forced us into the fucking stupid one.
And now we've hilariously headed towards c without part that makes it works. Insurance companies will go bankrupt. Which is way, way, way too nice for them.
Yeah, that's going to be an interesting political battle, right there.
Sure, the tea party people claim they want it repealed, but it's going to be interesting to actually ask them 'So you want insurance companies to deny insurance to children with pre-existing conditions again?'.
While I don't have a very good option of the tea party, when you actually ask them about the provisions of the health care law that they don't like, they (At least those who can actually point to parts) seem to only be able to pointed to 'forced to buy insurance'. That's it. That's all they actually object to.
None of them, no matter how anti-government, object to the rules requiring insurance companies to provide coverage to people. Maybe 1 out of 100. No matter how...um...uninformed (Trying to be nice here) the right's base is on this issue, 'Don't require insurance companies to insure unhealthy people!' is a damn hard rallying cry to get people behind.
Indeed, I half suspected something like this would happen, and as someone as liberal as humanly possible, I am laughing my ass off.
To recap: We should have had single payer system.
Instead, insurance companies, looking to make even more money, promised to insure everyone...but only if everyone was forced to buy from them, so that the healthy couldn't skip out on the deal.
If the latter part of that gets sentence struck down, insurance companies will have to insure anyone who wants it (I.e, who is currently sick) and then, when healthy, the person can just let their insurance lapse, secure in the fact they can just buy more insurance when they need, because insurance companies can no longer deny insurance on any grounds except failure to pay.
I am fucking rolling on the floor laughing. I mean that literally. I read this an hour ago, and it's taken me that long to stop laughing to comment. I had to make a support call during that, and I had serious difficulty not cracking up during it.
You just utterly fucked yourself, insurance companies. Oh, man, oh man.
I hope the teaparty folks take this as a rallying cry, and regardless of how this goes in the court, yell at their congressmen to remove exactly this part of the law.
You are so in love with your own smugly irrational ideology that basic arithmetic escapes you. a) no we would not, there is no need to "materialize" anything beyond the normal mining and exploration - the point of using a natural resource as a reference is scarcity - less mining the better, b) no, we would simply add a new sub-unit to $1 dollar, called cents. Should that prove insufficient, we would divide the cents into smaller sub-units, etc. The amount of gold that corresponds to each new unit would simply decrease as compared to the unchanged old units, the finite limit being an amount being small enough to be measured practically, at which point we would switch from gold to much more difficult to obtain (i.e. scarce) material and repeat the process, c) no such thing would have been needed.
Sigh. If you're expecting these new smaller units to be able to buy as much as the old units, (and thus the older ones could buy more) you've just REINVENTED FIAT CURRENCY, you idiot.
Do you really not grasp that gold-based currencies can't vary in value? The entire fucking point is that they are fixed to the price of gold. The only way for them to vary in value is for there to be more or less gold. (What's more, it might not even be possible for the government to control this by adding and removing gold coinage...the value might just be stuck, by the world market, to the gold market in general.)
You're assuming that somehow the dollar can be fixed to gold, but vary in value WRT everything else. Which is a) stupid, prices cannot operate like that, and b) if it did work, would defeat 90% of the supposed point of gold-based currency to start with, because now you do have inflation.
To repeat: WHAT YOU JUST DESCRIBED IS CALLED INFLATION, the exact thing you're railing against.
But, hey, I posed a puzzle for you in my other post. Go and solve it. Explain the actual changes you'd do, not how you're vaguely 'divide the currency more'.
In a fiat currency world, because of inflation, debt is seen not only as the trivial, commonplace norm, it is the fundamental factor in self-propelling the inflationary hamster wheel.
And now we get to the real nonsense, where inflation is blamed for all the woes, so if we have a system when it's not allowed, everything will magically be fine.
Of course, gold idiots never realize that we have inflation, deliberately, because inflation is a good thing. The alternative is to have random deflation and inflation as the economy changed in size. (Or have the economy trapped in a form-fitted box, as the gold idiots want.)
Keeping inflation slightly ahead of the economy causes the economy to constantly chase it, which is why we have policies to deliberately keep it like that. If you want to argue we've kept it too far ahead of an economy that hasn't grown much, you are correct in that, but it doesn't change the fact it's done on purpose and is a good idea when done correctly.
And none of the quite real problems you have with the borrowing economy has anything at all to do with inflation. In fact, strangely enough, half those problems were because we were trying to keep inflation low, so kept interest rates low, when it probably would have been better to do something else to keep inflation down. (And it would have been best of all to actually have economic growth instead of constant economic drain to other countries.)
Spoofing addresses should not be allowed. Networks should not let packets with source addresses outside their network on the internet in the first place.
You know, I'm not sure that was clear, and it's not your fault you're ignorant, so I will make a little example of what I'm talking about, and invite you to solve the problem I mentioned.I will simplify the numbers, and you will see the problem:
There is a gold standard. There are 20,000 ounces of gold that the US has, and it has turned 10,000 into dollars at $1 an ounce.
There are 1000 people in the US. All of them work. They make $10 a day, paid every day. There are 100 businesses. They each employ 10 people.
A week is 10 days, and, each week, on a random day, people take the $100 they've earned during that week, and go out and buy $100 worth of goods from the other businesses. This $100, over the next week, will be paid out to workers.
At any given time, there is an average of $50 in each person's bank account, and $500 in each business bank account. That's 50*1000+500*100. That's $10,000. This economy needs exactly as much money as it has.
But wait, the population increases! Now there are 1500 people, and 150 businesses. So the government has to issue more gold, and it keeps doing that until it hits $20,000 and physically runs out of gold.
So what happens when the population hits 2500? Well, it gets complicated, because it's a loop without an obvious start. Neither business nor people have enough cash, which would normally result in deflation, but can't here. (The money is always worth at least what the government will pay for it.)
Note that deflation is bad, but what happens is worse: People, to keep buying food, eventually start exchanging work directly in exchange for food, aka, going back to a barter economy. Businesses start issuing 'coupons' instead of paychecks, and eventually start issuing scrip, which is them functionally inventing their own fiat currency.
So, here's the question to you: What do you do to stop this from happening? Please note the population isn't the only way the economy grows, it's just the easiest to explain. (For example, notice what happens in the original if people only spend $9 a week and save $1.)
And this isn't some hypothetical. If we'd stayed on the gold standard of $35 an ounce, we'd have long run out of actual gold.
As far as the priests of the fiat currency religion go, I've heard a lot of exquisite bullshit and logical pretzels but this is my all time favourite: you see, currencies tied to physical natural resources are indivisible! You can't make more by simply dividing the unit of 1 (let's call the thing a "dollar") into 100 of (let's call the thing "cents"). Impossible I tell you!
If you divide the thing more among existing issued currency, aka, if one 'gold dollar' is now worth half the amount of gold, you have, tada, inflation, and you've just 'printed more money'. If, OTOH, you try to print more gold, um, I already said we're out of gold Not enough has actually been mined.
I don't even begin to understand how you think a gold-based system works, but the actual fact is, if we'd stayed on a gold standard, either a) We would have had to materialize twice as much gold as exists out of thin air, or b) we'd have had to change the price of a dollar from $35 an ounce to $70 an ounce, and then to $100 an ounce, and right now we'd need about $300 an ounce, c) we'd have started at that $300 an ounce price, which makes it a fiat currency where the government will only pay 10% of the actual value in gold, and we'll still hit B later, or d) we'd have an economy that's a tenth of the size of the current one, and about half the size of one capable of actually feeding everyone.
THERE ARE NO OTHER OPTIONS.
Please note that a requires magic, and is exactly the same as printing more money, b is manual inflation, and exactly the same as printing more money, c has uncontrollable inflation, and d has people dying in the streets because their employer does not have any money to physically hand them for them to exchange for food. (Or, more likely at this point, living on some not-backed-by-anything borrowing system, like the English did. Let's convert to an IOU based economy, where businesses and the wealthy issue scrip instead of paying people, and at some point we just all hope we need something from them so we can exchange it back.)
In a real, working economy the amount of labour is balanced by the amount of real services and products.
And in a real, working economy, both those must have enough actual cash to operate, which your hypothetical gold-based one soon would not allow.
As in not in "financial services" and "disposable entertainment" which in a sane world would represent a tiny minority of the economy. Economy that is based on producing bullshit for the sake of bullshit fake "money", all of it topped by a gigantic casino, is a bomb that must explode, eventually. As the victims of the con in the US (and the whole Western world actually) are discovering the hard way.
It is fucking amazing how gold loons tend to blame every economic issue on the money. Gold did not cause disposable entertainment, you idiot.
While you are indeed thinking of Switzerland, I find it disturbing also.
If someone is accused of rape and turns themselves in, in what universe are they denied access to their bank accounts?
Think what you want about the rape charge, but, hell, even if he'd confessed to rape, been tried and convicted, even in the worse hypothetical you can think of...he'd still be able to pay for a fucking lawyer out of his bank account. You can be on death row for a decade and still can write checks to your lawyer. (Freezing a bank account should not be confused with being ordered to pay restitution, which is a criminal punishment and, as such, happens after a trial. As Assange has not been tried yet, that is not relevant here.)
The only legal reason to freeze bank accounts is if the bank account is involved in a crime, or if he's fleeing justice...and, last I checked, rape doesn't have anything to do with finances at all. And he's not 'fleeing justice' when he's in custody(1).
This is probably the same logic that lead the UK government to deny bond, on the grounds he might be a 'flight risk'. A flight risk that, inexplicably, turned themselves in. Sorry, if you turn yourself in, bail should be pretty automatic and nominal...presumably, if you were going to flee, you would have just fled to start with.
Absolutely nothing is normal about how Assange is being treated, at all. He's charged with one crime, and then somehow that charge is letting government punish him for Wikileaks stuff that has nothing to do with that crime.
1) He only ever was 'fleeing justice' in crazy land where you're required to turn yourself in for criminal charges that don't exist...the second valid legal charges got filed against him, he contacted the police and turned himself in. Regardless of how people want to manipulate and lie about that, however, he's clearly in custody now, so his bank accounts should be unfrozen now.
Why are you lying about Wikileaks?
They have released less than 2000 cables.
I think anyone who repeats that lie that Wikileaks has released 250,000 cables should have 'MEDIA WHORE' branded onto their forehead, to demonstrate they are willing to repeat obviously factually wrong information as long as the media tells them.
Serious question. Yes, the BitCoins are and will further gain in value, which is normally called deflation.
And is a very bad thing. Worse than inflation.
There are a lot of economists who'd say that's a very bad thing, but those are the same ones who ram wall-street into the ground regularly, so I'd not give them too much credit.
No, Wall Street's capture of regulatory institutions and their inability to regulate cause the Great Fuckup, and Congress's inability to actually stop companies from going overseas caused the recession.
It has nothing at do with fiat currency, you idiot.
* Central banks could not print as much (FIAT) money as they'd like (now a days they use the euphemism: quantitative easing). They could not print any. This would mean, that they could not inflate away debt (which is what's actually going on). They'd actually had to do responsible accounting (imagine that). And it would permanently restrict the size of the economy.
That's the real joke all you anti 'fiat currency' loons don't get. If we'd, for example, stayed on the gold standard...there's not actually enough gold in existence to operate the economy at $35 an ounce.
We'd have fucking money shortages, which have actually happened before. It happened in England once, where people cannot actually locate enough money to actually do things. If there's only physically $400 floating around, no one can actually buy a damn car, and people have to start bartering for stuff.
When it happened last in England, luckily, checks had been invented, so trusted people would write checks (despite not having cash.) and people would pass them around like currency, until they got back to the trusted person.
In other words, 'fiat money' is so evil that people spontaneously invent it when forced to use your stupid system.
* This would encourage people to actually save and spend what they have, and not buy everything on debt creating massive problems down the road.
Ah, yes, and people saving money in the bank would help the economy. In stupid land, where recessions are caused by something other than people not purchasing things.
No one will spend money to buy stuff, and hence no one will need jobs, but that's okay because everyone can sit at home on their deflationary money and live off the fact their money is now, somehow, 'worth more'.
That is perhaps the dumbest economic theory I've ever...scratch that. That's the dumbest theory, period, that I've ever heard.
Please google 'The Great Depression' for more information. Please note the deflation rate during that. Wow, everyone could have sat at home and earned 10% interest every year! I wonder how there was a depression?
This all would make pretty good economic stability and nominal growth (not this exponential lunatic thing we see today, ending in bubbles most of the time).
Well, yes. If you destroy the economy, you can no longer have bubbles. Good catch.
Bubbles have nothing do with the currency at all. Nor do they even have anything to do borrowing.
Incidentally, you can't have 'nominal growth' under a fixed amount of currency. You can't have any growth. (Which poses a rather large problem when you do have population growth.)
This is all based on simple logic, and must not be true, but can it get much worse than it's right now? I doubt it.
Perhaps 'simple' you and your 'simple' logic should be getting back to the group home? I think there's ice cream this evening!
Actually, thinking about this, the 'safest' way to do this is to require them to have a fake ticket. The TSA-IG should issue one when you sign in.
Then you can't get on any plane.
For even added security, you could put the TSA-IG person right behind security, and he sees the names of everyone who goes through, and any tester's name gets highlighted, and immediately after they go through, he grabs them.
He's grabbing them to give them money, of course, but it stops all security concerns like 'Someone might sign up and pass the stuff off to another person once in'.
Of course, that's a rather idiotic plan. A better plan is to just 'forgot' stuff in your bag...they're not going to arrest you for having a pocketknife in your bag, and plenty of people have plenty of stories about that getting missed.
If you're a terrorist and smart enough to shuffle stuff around inside the security area, it's trivial to just keep someone in the security area (Via a flight in.) and have them keep collecting stuff as you hit-and-miss the things singley past security. Hell, they can occasionally get on airplanes and move to another airport's secure area, although someone else would have to buy and print their ticket (and a ticket for themselves) and take it in...you can't print a ticket in the secure area that I can think of. OTOH, nothing stops you from taking a printer in with you...
Frankly, if I was an anti-TSA activist, and didn't care about flying, and had the money, I'd get a bunch of people to blatantly do this in front of the TSA with liquids. One person carry in a dozen empty gallon jugs in their luggage, and then have people just keep streaming in and filling up the jugs from 2oz shampoo bottles, right in full view of them. If you actually used shampoo, it's hard to see what, exactly, they'd do about it, even though you've flagrantly managed to get more than 2 oz from the outside into the secure area....and everyone else gets the point that it didn't have to be shampoo, it could be whatever nonsensical thing is dangerous over 2oz.